Description of problem: I'm using Xen on a FC6 (x86_64) system (Dell E521, AMD X2 4200 with Pacifica-Support) with a number of different guest systems (paravirtualized as well as fully virtualized ones). One of these is a FC6 (i386), running in HVM mode (because AFAIK x86_64 Xen does not support i386 paravirtualized guests). Everything worked fine so far. Today, I did a yum update in the guest machine, loading the updates for the last 2-3 weeks. This was okay to. Unfortunately, the guest won't start anymore. I'm getting these boot messages (manually typed in here, typing errors may be present): ... no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults Switching to new root and running init. unmounting old /dev unmounting old /proc unmounting old /sys ... wait for some time ... hda: DMA interrupt recovery hda: lost interrupt hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x24 (again and again) My host system is fully patched as as of 01/06/2007 and so is the guest system. As a special exception, I am running kernel version 2.6.18-1.2857.4.2.fc6.0.2.sctxen on the host system in order to get my Broadcom network chipset working. I can boot the guest just fine using qemu from Fedora Extras. How reproducible: Always (host system reboot did not solved the problem).
I was able to gather some more info after creating another HVM FC6 guest (32 bit) which did not start either after loading all the updates. Again, this was a minimal install of Fedora (no X). In the second machine, the error message had something to do with not finding any LVM volumes which is bad because I used the proposed standard partitioning so the system could not find my /. However, the system booted with the old kernel (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 instead of 2.6.18-1.2869.fc6). Therefore I tried booting with my first VM with the same kernel version and it works. Obviously, something in the kernel package changed which broke my HVM guests... I do not experience these problems with my normal FC6 machines (i386 and x86_64) which also use LVM partitioning.
works for me now.